BACARDI RUM AD SHAKEN WHEN STIRRED

Yesterday, you saw a black and white ad from the pages of PLAYBOY magazine that featured the fiendish countenance of sometimes-horror actor Henry Daniell. The ad appeared in the magazine in 1965, two years after his death.

The Bacardi Rum ad must have had legs because another ad, albeit with the same image, had run two years earlier -- this time in color -- in the October 1963 issue of PLAYBOY. Not to understate yet another morbid coincidence, but October 1963 was the month and year that Henry Daniell died. To make things even weirder, he died on Halloween.

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DEVILISHLY SMOOTH AND FIENDISHLY DRY

Quite at home playing the villain, actor Henry Daniell had a face made for horror films. Able to crack a wry, sinister countenance seemingly at will, Daniell played all sorts of bad guys during his long film career.

To genre fans, he is best remembered as "Toddy" MacFarlane alongside Karloff's John Gray in the film adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's THE BODY SNATCHER. He also played the ancient, head-shrinking Jivaro witch doctor in THE FOUR SKULLS OF JONATHAN DRAKE. He even had the distinction of playing Dr. Moriarity in one of his numerous film roles in the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes series of films.

His evil-looking visage was the perfect image for a series of Bacardi Rum magazine spreads with a "devilishly smooth and fiendishly dry" ad copy theme. The examples shown here are from the March 1965 issue of PLAYBOY. A devilishly strange and fiendishly morbid fact about his appearance here is that Mr. Daniell had been already dead for two years.

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BEFORE THEY WERE SCREAM QUEENS

Many of the scream queens and horror hotties that we have come to know and love have not always first appeared -- fully formed, as it were -- on the horror screen. Most of them got their start in modeling and other types of film roles.

The 13 NOVEMBER 1956 issue of the bi-weekly digest TEMPO (Vol. 7 No. 10) featured an article, What's In a Face?, that included photos of two future scream queens.

Alison Hayes was pictured in a one-piece swimsuit, posing with a beach bag thrown casually over her shoulder, and described as a former "Miss Washington". As we horror fans know, Hayes went on to become one of the Atom Age cinema icons when she starred as the titular ATTACK OF THE 50 FOOT WOMAN (1958).

Valerie French, seen in the article lounging in a provocative pose and holding a cigarette after her role in JUBAL, later played the part of Alison Drake in the Vogue Pictures horror melodrama, THE FOUR SKULLS OF JONATHAN DRAKE (1959). At one time a "Miss Galaxy" and married for a few years to Thayer David (Professor Stokes and other characters in the original DARK SHADOWS), she finished off her acting career playing in soap operas such as ALL MY CHILDREN.

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MYRON FASS MINI-MONSTER RALLY

It's no secret that Myron Fass and family are well-known as the magazine publishing kings of horror exploitation. Their empire tried everything from Kennedy to the occult in efforts to make a buck. Men's mags, monster mags, you name it -- their output of genre titles far exceeded even Warren's varied lines.

With the exception of longer running magazines such as WEIRD and HORROR TALES, titles were ususally short-lived. One attempt at jumping on the "adult humor" bandwagon was OGLE. Part satire, part spoof, and part men's mag, it ran for a few issues, then petered out (no pun intended) like so many others.

Of interest to monster fans, however, was a three-page spread in OGLE #4 (August 1960) called Ogle Goes to a Monster Rally. It contained several pictures of posed shots and even a still from Paul Blaisdell's IT, THE TERROR FROM BEYOND SPACE.

In true exploitative style, the photos were provocatively posed with women either shown as victims or femme fatales. It is commonly thought that the subjects in these photos were either staffers dressed up or cheaply-hired actors. Knowing the frayed shoestring of a budget that the Fass' worked off of, I'd put my money on the staffers.

One particular subject was used several times over the span of a few years. An unidentified, "long-in-tooth" vampire woman was seen in several horror titles, including SHOCK TALES and the second issue of THRILLER.


SHOCK TALES #1 (1959)

 

THRILLER #2 (1962)

  

A rare look at the interior of THRILLER #2
(photo from eBay).



Another interior sample from THRILLER #2.

Another feature in OGLE #4 was a humor piece that claimed editor Myron Fass was really a woman! Of course, it was another excuse at using pictures of (at least in this case anyway) attractive and bosomy women, posing in apparel as flimsy as the premise of the article.

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WHAT HORRORS LURK BEHIND THE COVER OF THIS MAGAZINE?

Lending veracity to the long-held assertion that I only look at PLAYBOY magazine for the articles ;) is a discovery that I made in the August 2011 issue. An article by Jason Zinoman, Shock Value, profiled horror film director Wes Craven.

Always looking for a politcal or societal angle from which to hang their bunny ears, the editors add this subtitle to the article: "Wes Craven created films that became the bloody heart of cinema's New Horror -- box office killers that assaulted the audience's complacency and are populated by demons that are no match to America's own".

The feature focuses mainly on Craven's unsettling picture, THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT. I had the dubious fortune of seeing it in a South Bend, Indiana when it first played in 1972. I had graduated from High School that June and was traveling the country with my parents. We were in Michigan and my cousin and her boyfriend took me the few miles south to see the movie.

Like many other viewers, I found the violence shocking and was left wondering where were the monsters in this supposed "horror" film? That was Wes Craven's contribution that changed the way horror films were subsequently approached by filmmakers. The 100-mile-an-hour plus drive back to Benton Harbor in the boyfriend's Dodge Challenger all added up to a mind-bending night.

The article shown here turns out to be an excerpt from Zinoman's book, Shock Value: How a Few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares, Conquered Hollywood, and Invented Modern Horror, published by Penguin in July 2011.

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IT CAME FROM THE MEN'S MAGAZINE!

"It is the mark of the evil one! We are lost! But the white woman will be mine before I die!"

In my never-ending search for the weird, the bizarre, the unexplained, I end up in some of the strangest places. Granted, what I come up with sometimes may not be monster magazine material that is pure in heart, but you can be guaranteed it will always be curious, if not, downright entertaining.

Today's post is one of those odd finds that I felt compelled to share. The topic is on the borderlands of pop culture artifact and politcally correct propriety. Consider it then, the MONSTER MAGAZINE WORLD version of a "paranormal romance" story. And, believe me, this story is anything but normal. For instance, check out the author's name and you'll know what I mean.

Enjoy, but please keep your jaw in place and hold back on the laughing.

"Lisa was a gorgeous woman with full breasts and red full lips, and though she acted as if she was colder than ice caps on the mountain, I knew she had her eye on me."

"From where we were clinging, we could see the grey matter ooze out of his skull and form a pool of crimson blood on the white snow."

THE END?

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